CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
I kiss my way down her body. Not slowly — not tonight.
Tonight I am not practicing the patience she taught me.
Tonight I am using everything she taught me in service of something faster and more direct, because what Nerys needs right now is not a lesson in delayed gratification.
It's proof that her body is capable of pleasure that exists outside the framework of control, that her hands can act without instructions and find something other than failure.
I pull her trousers down. Her underwear. She lifts her hips to help — the motion urgent, uncoordinated, nothing like the measured elevation of previous encounters. I settle between her legs and I look up at her.
She's looking down at me. Auburn hair spread across the pillow, silver streak glowing against the white cotton, hands gripping the sheets beside her hips. Her chest is rising and falling rapidly. Her skin is flushed from her collarbones to her cheekbones. Her eyes are wide and dark and unprotected.
"Tell me what you want," I say.
She takes a breath. "Your mouth. And your hands."
"Specific."
A sound that is almost a laugh, except laughter requires a levity she doesn't have right now. "Your mouth on me. Your fingers inside me. I want—" She stops. Starts again. "I want to feel you everywhere and I want to stop thinking."
I give her my mouth first. Not the careful, patient approach I used in the cottage.
I put my mouth on her with the focused intensity I bring to approach shots — committed, aggressive, precise.
My tongue finds her clit and works it with pressure and rhythm and the specific knowledge of what makes Nerys Quillan lose the ability to form sentences, knowledge I have accumulated over weeks and stored in the same part of my brain that stores pin positions and wind patterns.
She gasps. Her hips rise. Her hands leave the sheets and find my head — fingers in my hair, gripping, pulling me closer. Not directing — holding. Anchoring herself to the one fixed point in a room that has become unstable.
I slide two fingers inside her while my tongue maintains its rhythm. She's wet and warm and she tightens around me immediately, her body responding with a speed that tells me she's been closer to this edge than she would have admitted.
"More," she says.
"More what?"
"Another finger. Please."
I add a third. Slowly, watching her face, reading the micro-expressions the way I've learned to read greens — the momentary tension that means I need to adjust, the softening that means I've found the right angle. She takes me in and her mouth opens and the sound she makes is not a word.
I curl my fingers forward. Press the front wall. Find the spot that makes her back arch and her hands fist in my hair and her thighs clamp around my shoulders.
My mouth works faster. My hand works deeper.
I am using the aggressive instinct that defined my game for a decade — the instinct to attack, to pursue, to close the distance between where I am and where I need to be — except now the instinct has been refined by weeks of patience and precision, and the combination of aggression and accuracy is devastating.
I can feel her building. The tremor in her thighs. The rhythm of her breathing — faster, shallower, losing its pattern. Her fingers in my hair tighten until the pull is almost painful and I don't care because the pain is communication and what it communicates is don't stop.
I don't stop.
She comes with her hands fisted in my hair and her back arched off the mattress and a sound I will hear in my dreams for the rest of my life — not a scream, not a moan, something between them, a raw vocalization that contains my name broken into pieces and reassembled into something that is both prayer and profanity.
Her body shakes. All of it. Not just her hands — her thighs, her stomach, her shoulders. The orgasm moves through her like weather through open ground, visible and total, and her hands release my hair and fall to the mattress and lie there, trembling, and then slowly, gradually, go still.
I withdraw my fingers. Move up her body. Lie beside her. Press my face against her shoulder. Feel her breathing decelerate.
Her hands are resting on the mattress between us. I look at them. Long fingers. The scarred thumb. The faint lines of tendon beneath the fair skin.
Still.
Not rigid-still. Not forced-still. Not the white-knuckled stillness of a woman pressing her palms against her thighs to suppress a tremor.
Quiet-still. Resting-still. The stillness of hands that have been used well and are finished and need nothing else.
"They stopped shaking," I say.
"They do that sometimes. After."
"After what?"
She turns her head. Looks at me. Her expression is open in a way I have seen only twice before — in the cottage by the fire, and in the dark hotel room when I held her hand for twenty minutes without speaking.
"After someone reminds them they're more than the worst thing they ever did."
I feel the sentence land in my chest. Below the ribs. Where the things I feel about this woman live — not in my brain, not in my body, but in the space between the two where language becomes inadequate and everything that matters is sensation.
She pulls me up. Kisses me. Long and slow and trembling at the edges — not from the yips, not from fear, from the aftershock of being known. She tastes herself on my mouth and doesn't flinch and the intimacy of that — the willingness to receive herself through me — makes my eyes sting.
"You are not what I expected," she says. Her voice is rough and low and sounds like the voice she uses at dawn on a quiet course, when she's reading the terrain and the words are directed at the ground rather than at anyone listening.
"Better or worse?"
"More." She touches my face. Her hand — the right one, the scarred one — cradles my jaw the way it did in the corridor at Kiawah, except this time the fingers are steady and the touch carries the weight of every tremor that preceded it. "Just more."
I rest my head on her chest. Her heartbeat is slow and deep and even.
Her hands come to rest on my body — one on my shoulder, one on my hip. Quiet. Present. Not managing or measuring or calculating. Just resting on the woman they've chosen to touch.
·
We fall asleep tangled. Her long body and my compact one, arranged in the configuration that has become familiar over weeks of hotel beds and borrowed spaces — my head on her chest, her arm around my shoulders, her leg hooked over mine.
I wake before she does.
The room is light. Morning. The kind of gray-blue Scottish light that makes everything look like a watercolor — soft edges, muted tones, the world not yet committed to full saturation.
Nerys is sleeping on her back. Her face is turned slightly toward me. Her lips are parted. Her breathing is deep and regular and the analytical line between her brows is absent.
Her hands are resting on the pillow beside her head. Both of them. Open. Palms up. Fingers relaxed. The scarred thumb on the right hand catches the early light.
They look like hands at rest. Not hands in recovery, not hands between episodes, not hands waiting for the next tremor. Hands that have done their work and are sleeping.
I pick up my phone from the nightstand. I open the camera. I photograph them.
The frame contains: the white pillow, the pale skin, the long fingers, the scar, the stillness. No face. No context. No tournament or microphone or gallery. Just hands. Beautiful, imperfect, still hands lying open on a pillow in the morning light.
I look at the photograph. I close the camera. I set the phone down.
I don't post it anywhere. I don't send it to anyone. I don't save it to a cloud where others might find it.
I keep it for myself. A private record of a moment that belongs to no narrative except the one between us.
Her hands, at rest.
The most extraordinary thing I've ever seen on any course, in any country, under any conditions.
More beautiful than any shot I've ever hit.
Worth more than any trophy I may ever win.
I lie back down. Press my face against her shoulder. Close my eyes.
Her hand — the right one, the scarred one — moves in her sleep. It finds my hair. Her fingers curl loosely against my scalp.
Still.
Still.
Still.